SPARC Microprocessor Simulation System

Embedded system is becoming more powerful than before, which causes its architecture to be more and more complicated. Embedded software testing and debugging will be more difficult than any other desktop software systems. Generally, embedded system testing needs a cross-compiling circumstance and strongly relys on hardware platform. To set different test conditions for the hardware platform can help engineers find errors conveviently and make embedded system testing to be easier. SPARC is a RISC chip, widely used in aeronautics and astronautics due to its high performance and low power consumption.Firstly, some traditional software models, such as UML, are almost mechanical and passive. Software engineers have to predict all of the possible situations by themselves. Having been analyzed SPARC architecture, a pipeline simulation model is proposed in the paper. Because of pipeline parallel and correlation among different variables, conflicts in the instruction pipeline can come into being frequently and randomly and can't be avoided.Secondly, a Petri Net model based on Agent architecture is put forward to implement SPARC simulation system. Agent architecture has found wide applications due to its characteristics such as autonomy, responsiveness, initiative, reasoning, communications, cooperation and coordination etc. This model can solve real-time issue, concurrency problem and troubles that by interacting with the hardware of system and the external environment. MAS(Multi-Agent System) model is used for the SPARC architecture simulation to resolve the interactions among different modules. A new type Time Synchronous Petri model is designed and implemented to resolve the problem about multi-signal and concurrency in the pipeline.Finally, a SPARC simulation system based on the model is designed and implemented with Visual C++ as the development tool on windows XP OS. Some test cases, including complicated mathematical calculation programs, large scale sorting programs, and recursive call programs, are designed to test the simulation system. These programs can be executed correctly on the SPARC platform. And every running time of these test cases is correlative to its respective time running on the practical SPARC embedded platform. These test data show that the Petri net model based Agent architecture applied in SPARC system simulation is feasible and efficient.